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Former Croyden Advertiser chief reporter Gareth Davies created a social media storm with his criticism of Trinity Mirror.

There have been few occasions as far as I can recall when two such prominent editorial executives such as Trinity Mirror’s Neil Benson and David Higgerson have been moved to respond in such detail from the criticism of one reporter.

I understand that there was an emotional outcry when former Croyden Advertiser chief reporter Gareth Davies spilled the beans on how he felt TM was destroying his beloved newspaper.

The response from Mr Benson and Mr Higgerson showed as much passion for what TM is doing as Mr Davies obviously has for the Advertiser and his belief that TM is ruining it.

But, from what I know one of the firm’s digital documents states that 43 per cent of stories on TM’s top 12 web sites have generated an audience of fewer than 1,000 page views.

This is in a section which asks how well the firm’s journalists know its audience. The inference from this section clearly is that 1,000 pvs is a benchmark for stories…

Based on this, you can perhaps conclude that there’s a misunderstanding by some of the TM team over what is required, this isn’t a ban, just a quiet word of guidance.

What is clear, is that TM has a plan, this has not always been the case for many newspaper groups. It is based around growing its digital audience, so the focus of the newsroom is clearly geared towards this.

Analytics of the audience is a tool to help this growth. Never has an editor had so much quality intelligence about its audience.

Most journalists I have worked with write stories which they believed were important to their readers. There was never a day when an editor and his top team worth their salt didn’t talk about sales and how to improve them.

The times a gleeful newspaper sales manager entered a news conference to proclaim a sales spike on the back of a top story are too many to remember.

No, the newspaper men and women I worked with were obsessed with their ‘audience’ (readers) so there is nothing new on that front.

The difference is that now there is more evidence available to work out which stories the audience is reading.

What would you rather rely on, fact or instinct with a teaspoon of evidence from the sales history of a newspaper?

However, there is a word or two of caution here, the web audience is different to the newspaper audience, so what works well online doesn’t necessarily reflect what might work well in print.

I was also concerned with the point raised that there’s more content in the newspapers. Recently, sadly, I spent a day counting stories and pages in a couple of TM’s biggest regional papers.

I used the same formula as I had used when I was a deputy editor and editor and it was clear to me that rather than there being more stories there were fewer. I used to aim for between 65-100 local news stories a day in my papers and a minimum of 15-17 overnight pages.

Clearly, from my research, this wasn’t the case and there were a lot of centrally produced pages, which I didn’t count, because I wouldn’t have previously.

This is not a direct criticism, but there are fewer local stories, fewer pages and newspapers cost a lot more. With staff cuts and an emphasis on digital, something has to give.

One of the reasons for fewer stories is because a journalist will be asked to go out on a story, cover it live, write Tweets, post it on Facebook, a version or two online and then it is shifted to the paper.

This takes time, so one story will be polished, but there’s many other stories that won’t be written due to lack of time. The idea is to get, say 20, great stories online and get the audience to come by building content around them.

I guess the way to resolve this is to harvest content from elsewhere to publish, but once again this takes time, unless you can get out the automatic content scrapers.

When we got rid of the editions of the newspaper and printed overnight the newspaper felt dead, we dreamed of those adrenalin busting days of swapping stories around and writing breaking news.

This died with overnight production, but the web gave us a continual edition and I think reinvigorated the newspaper office, the buzz returned and that was great.

However, the demands are many for the journalists at any newspaper group. The 21st century journalist has to have an array of skills, which is exciting for the next generation.

At the centre of this is the ability to tell a great story using core journalistic skills but they also need to understand how to attract an audience using analytics, understand Twitter and Facebook, after all, just view these as modern day bill boards, the ability to use Facebook Live or Periscope, to edit video and write great SEO.

Challenging, yes, but this multi-skilling has helped to reinvent a business which was floundering. It is because a journalist is asked to do so much that massive effort is put into key stories.

What these stories are, is now based on a history of performance online. Is this click-bait then or the ability to give the audience content they want to read?

After all, a newspaper and a website are products which have to be sold, I can’t see Tesco’s selling something no-one wants to buy.

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of concerns about the ability of firms to hold authority to account, for example, how many local councils and health authority meetings are covered today?

Newspaper groups may well argue that the reality is that no-one wants to read this anyway, where is the audience, so why cover them?

I completely understand Mr Davies for being so annoyed with the way TM has developed. But what choice did the firm have?

Newspaper sales are in terminal decline and there’s a chance to keep the business going by throwing resource into digital.

The issue however comes down to cash. Most of the money still arrives from newspaper advertising and sales, as sales decline, so will the cash.

However, no newspaper group will ever be able to get the same revenue returns online, even if the cuts go deeper.

So we will all have to accept that it’s a different business, one with less income, better audience knowledge, journalists with different, but more skills.

Is it better or worse than when I started? Difficult to say, it’s just different. I often had the discussion with my newsdesk about content.

I constantly challenged them on whether the stories newspapers had traditionally covered were the stories for the 21st century readership?

What we are seeing is that the content produced has to reflect the new needs of the audience.

The web has proved that a re-focus of what is good content is needed and that is why it has changed and Mr Davies is unhappy, as are many other journalists who plied their trade when regional newspapers were in their pomp.

There is an argument to say that the policies of modern newspaper groups has accentuated the decline.

But for at least two decades the industry dithered over what to do with the web and while this went on the world passed it by.

Now there’s a lot of catching up to do.

Regional journalism has some great challenges ahead. My hope is that surely, continuing to tell great stories means that it will continue to be the best job in the world…for now.

I flippantly said that not even Kiefer Sutherland could save this 24, sadly, like so many people in the newspaper industry, we wished it success, but deep down knew it had little hope.

Six weeks is not long enough to see if something will work. However, I would be more concerned about the thought processes which set the wheels in motion to launch the paper in the first place, as I was over the strange decision to launch New Day, which lasted just nine weeks.

I admire entrepreneurial spirit, but with the landscape increasingly bleak for papers in the regions, just look at the latest ABC figures, and the next batch will not look much better.

The figures suggest that the newspapers with the lowest sales have a lesser decline because there’s nowhere else to go in terms of decline, while the biggest papers just keep losing big chunks of sale.

The dilemma an editor faces today is where to put his resources. Within a company such as Trinity Mirror there is a clear digital first strategy.

But the reality is that there’s a relentless move to bring in the audience and get page views at all newspapers.

Based on this the editor has to decide to whether to put all their eggs in one basket and just do digital or carry on doing the paper and hope no-one notices that digital performance is lagging behind.

Of course, you might say that editors need to do both. The reality is that with fewer staff than ever before you cannot be all things to all men.

The philosophy of digital content has shifted. In the early days, regional newspapers used to put up every story written for the newspaper, often in one bulk upload.

Things are more sophisticated now and there’s a constant flow of content with particular emphasis on key times of the day and for the digital operation, rather than throwing up as many stories as possible online, to polish fewer stories and build more content around it.

The outcome is that many of the digital stories can take time to put together. If a reporter is out live blogging from an event, or on Facebook Live, taking pictures, and sending out Tweets, the chances of doing many more stories in a day is limited.

So when the print gang turn up to produce the newspaper they may not have as much content to play with as they had in a bygone era, where story content and value for money were high on the editor’s agenda.

What I have noticed is to compensate for the drive on digital in the regions, paginations have gone down, as has story count, while at the same time the cost of buying a newspaper has risen dramatically.

While the decline in sales has been endless, the above is a recipe for a nose-dive.

But does it matter? The business is firmly placed in digital land and the newspaper is just one aspect of that.

While The Independent took a brave step to bin its paper version and go digital only, I still think that a modern media firm needs both a presence online and in paper.

At the moment the revenue from newspapers sales continues to boost the coffers of these firms, but increasing cover price will inevitably see the readers disappear.

Once this happens, a different model for print will have to be created and the once great regional beasts will probably have to consider either charging £2 a copy or going free or part free.

But, as the grip on staff numbers tightens, who is going to want to read regurgitated content in the newspaper which appeared online 12 hours earlier?

My thoughts were always to make online the first read and the paper the last read.

The Times has taken a similar stance, both in paper and online. It doesn’t published continuously unless a big story breaks. This allows the paper to print online in an edition structure and the benefit is that readers get the fuller story rather than endless snippets.

This flies in the face of just about every other news media outlet, but it is not without merit when you think about the endless content put out when a story is breaking and having to piece it all together like a jigsaw.

It is an experiment worth watching but perhaps reflects the readership of The Times, 55+, who frankly do not fancy endless news feeds.

However, we all have to remember that the paper is still the cash cow. Simply, advertisers pay pence for page impressions and the cash coming in is not enough and certainly will never reach the scale of the amount of money made by newspaper businesses in their pomp.

Finally, I was with an SEO news guru a week or so ago and they stopped me in my tracks. Passionately they spoke about how to get your news on top on the Google pile and it’s often down to the fine art of SEO headline writing.

Who were the best headline writers? Sub-editors. The expert went onto say that media groups will regret not having this much-maligned breed back in their newsrooms, surely they said, they would have been the best SEO headlines writers in the business?

However, I’m a little surprised this has happened just a short time after the dramatic closure of Trinity Mirror’sNew Day. On the one hand my heart wants to cheer the news of a newspaper opening, but my head just says it’s a train crash waiting to happen.

And what sort of newspaper is it? It will have an editor and two reporters bravely drafted in for however long as the paper lasts. Much of the content will be supplied by PA and the reporters will spend time giving the content a northern feel.

The newspaper, the idea of independent regional publisher CN Group, is modelled on the Metro, which also uses lots of wire content but doesn’t have a foothold in the area. The new paper will cost 40p for just 40 pages, a penny a page, while the Metro is a free pick-up based around the transport network.

According to the Press Gazette, CN’s Group chief executive Miller Hogg says that the decision to launch a new title was based on research into the distribution area and is aimed at people who “want a straight-talking newspaper which is of relevance”.

Interesting. What does ‘relevance’ mean in this case. I can only assume it means that it has stories from the north. Mr Hogg talks about covering northern football and court cases from the big northern city.

Sad to say, but not even Kiefer Sutherland can save 24 from ending up on the scrapheap.

This is fine, but why would it work? This is a traditional format of news, bundling up stories and throwing it at the public. It is clear the public no longer want this, or to be more accurate, they don’t need to have this form of bundled news.

The public are now their own editors. They don’t sit and wait by the letterbox for a newspaper put together by an editor who has decided what they need to read.

Readers are now their own editor, they decide what news they want. Thanks to search engines they can find their specific areas of interest and don’t even look at other news out there.

For years editors fed the public with news, but the reality is that people chose what they wanted to read in a newspaper and glazed over the rest.

What the web has highlighted is that much of the news produced in a bygone era failed to register with readers, unless they had an interest in it.

This is why newspaper groups monitor to depth what they put online and if an article, video or blog brings in an audience, they add similar content to feed the audience until they have had enough.

This is part of the reason for the decline of newspapers, the idea of bundling up news and giving it to readers is out-dated.

You could argue that 24 will be read because it has its own bundle of northern news, but this will not be enough. The only saving grace is that CN is looking for at a conservative readership of 10,000, usually the breaking point where a daily becomes a weekly.

But, like the New Day, not having its own web site is a big hole in the business plan. Having said that, Google doesn’t like duplicate content and with much content coming from PA, this will be inevitable as stories are picked up by other outlets.

It is interesting to note that recent research shows that 60 per cent of those who use Twitter and Facebook rely on these social media giants to provide their news, this figure can only go up.

For most of their lives, regional newspapers have bundled content together and thrown it into their products, like chucking paint at a wall.

Should regional newspapers be looking at another way of making money than the tired newspaper/web combination?

The idea was/is to satisfy all of their customers at once by putting content together from all walks of life, on numerous subjects from a variety of places, in the hope that readers will find comfort from a couple of articles per edition.

This culture was adopted by local newspaper web sites. Lob as much content at the site in the hope of grabbing some readers.

However, there has been little thought to putting these web sites together in terms of content. It has been little more than copy what the newspapers do, bundle it all together.

In fact there has been little thought as to whether the newspaper/web site alliance works together at all.

There is also evidence that people don’t trawl through the web site looking for what they want, why would you if you can do a Google search?

This method of bundling content together is outdated. It has been exposed with the advent of the web because the untold secret is that the majority of people only really read a small proportion of a newspaper and now the same can be said of the web site.

This is one of the reasons for the decline of newspaper sales, the formula doesn’t work for today’s consumers. I often talk about the concept of the end of mass media and the rise of personal media.

Readers simply choose exactly what they want by going to certain web sites or downloading the apps with the content that interests them. They don’t want a mishmash of content which they can’t or won’t navigate through, they don’t have time to sort out the gems of content they are looking for.

Effectively, if they were reading a newspaper they would be binning most of the pages and keeping the one or two pages which have something they may be interested in.

This is also reflected in the number of web pages people visit on regional newspaper sites. If you hit above two to three pages per unique user you are doing well.

So is the model for regional newspapers of a paper and web site the wrong one? Well, audience is growing on these web sites, but the plateau may not be that far away.

They will get their spikes with the odd great story or well-constructed web bait, but is this enough to keep the cash rolling in?

We already know that the Mail Online and The Sun are not hitting the revenue required online to prop up the falling print revenues, the same can be said in the regionals, however the accountants attempt to cover up the cracks.

Web advertising income is up, but that’s inevitable as the print income falls and the newspaper groups throw the kitchen sink at trying to sell online, sometimes even prepared to lose print revenue, just to prove a point.

Just look at Local World’s latest figures. The report boasts of a £43.6m profit. But, as a friend of mine points out, once you remove what the shareholders take off the firm and other costs the profit is just more than £11m.

Then look at the digital revenues, up 22 per cent to £24.6m, the press release screams, but print revenues saw an 8pc decline to…just (just?!)£131.5m, but still generated almost 60pc of the group’s overall revenues of £221m.

Sorry, I digress. Delivering content is now about delivering to a targeted audience. These readers maybe small in number, but they will be profitable for advertisers attempting to reach the readers directly.

I’m sure advertisers are unhappy with the thought that many of their adverts are presently seen by thousands of people who live…across the sea…

So rather than concentrating content online, why not in a dozen or more apps? I’ve already spoken about how health stories are not seen as good for engagement on the web or social media, but the term ‘health’ is too general.

Are all stories about cancer, pregnancy or your local hospital really read by so few people? The answer is no.

So what kind of apps you may ask? In city ‘A’ 12,000 children a year need pre-school education. If all the mums and dads sign up to an education app, financed and paid for by the education authority, plus ads sold on the app to a targeted audience, surely this would work as a business model?

Add a further dozen of these apps for things such as pregnancy, eating out, local shopping and suddenly you have unbundled the news to satisfy your readers and advertisers can be assured that they are hitting a local audience head-on, not from across the sea.

For those who are wondering how their newspapers can be filled, a selection of the app content can be put into the newspaper and dveloped, if required.

OK, I accept this is not a perfect solution but what it allows is for the old newspaper/web business to be more attractive to the modern consumer.

Unbundling content is the way forward. Just think of what all of you do every day. You choose to look at certain web sites and apps looking for certain content.

Regional newspapers and newspaper web sites don’t offer this luxury. Like a teenager on their first date they have been fumbling around for too long looking for a magic formula. They now need to grow up and look for a better/different business model, the lives of so many people depend on it.

It’s easy to blame the web for the decline in newspaper sales. Like most industries, there’s always a need to find an easy answer to what went wrong, but this is too simplistic. Why did sales fall off the end of the cliff?

The reality is much more complex than the emergence of the web. The internet wasn’t just switched on in 2006 and the world came to an end. Why 2006?

Having emptied my briefcase for the first time since 1987, I came across some fascinating sales figures from a couple of newspapers I was lucky enough to have worked for.

What they clearly highlight is that for regional newspapers life was pretty rosy until this point.

The rise of web sites isn’t the only reason why newspaper sales have declined.

The figures I found, even with the bulks taken out, show that though sales were on the way down, it was a steady, moderate decline, not the 10-20 per cents we are seeing now.

So, from the early 80s until 2006 the average annual sales decline according to my stats was around -2.6% for the newspapers I worked for. Many editors would give their right hand for this result today.

Then we hit 2006. Suddenly the average sale loss hit between six and seven per cent, for some it was even heavier losses.

This became the trend for a few years until around 2012 when newspapers, if they hadn’t already, started hitting the double digit sales decline. Today, other than the odd exception, most of the decline sits unhappily above 10 per cent.

Those which aren’t quite there are often the smaller selling newspapers which have probably hit the plateau of decline. Indeed, if they were in double figures they would be shut or free within a couple of years.

What this decline does show is that the web is not the only excuse for the sales loss. The web has been around for many more years than the last nine years of rapid decline.

I accept that newspapers pay more attention to it than ever before, but that’s because the newspaper sales decline has speeded this process up. What actually happened in those dark days of 2006?

The truth is that the advertising income suddenly collapsed, particularly classified, and owners realised that the regional newspapers were no longer cash cows.

One regional newspaper owner used to call their regional papers the jewel in his crown as the millions rolled in. But it was in 2006 that they suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth, the royal visits to the provinces ended, never to return.

With the prospect of incomes on the slide there was an invasion of grey-suited consultants. They entered the offices to start their bean counting. What was sad about the process of dismantling the business was that these poor folk knew nothing about newspapers.

I remember well being questioned why one reporter had only written 10 stories in a month and another 200. The answer was simple.

One was an investigative reporter who helped to jail a county council leader. These kind of stories cannot be knocked out in five minutes, the other reporter was a junior who spent their time banging out nibs.

But they just didn’t get it and asked how many stories could be written in an hour, in two hours. How many pages could be subbed in an hour or a day?

By the way, the target was to sub eight pages a day. I recommend any sub/content editor to see if they can sub eight pages a day based on a reasonably high story count and small ads. It’s really tough, no chance of a lunch break.

So with incomes down, staff cuts, getting rid of editions, reducing the covering of courts and council, reducing pagination, printing on toilet paper, increasing cover price, oh, and a bigger emphasis of the web, sales started to dip dramatically. The perfect storm.

Ok, I can’t hang my coat on any one of these being completely responsible for the sales decline. Collectively, however, they are a potent force. What it does mean, however, is that the evil web is not necessarily to blame.

Equally, the web is not the part of the business which will prop up the newspapers either. Yep, we all know the truth, that however you fiddle the figures or get the poor advertising folk to flog ads online, the chances of making up for print revenue decline via the web is as unlikely as England winning the Ashes this year or anyone considering that George Bush was a great president.

If it could, we wouldn’t have seen the cuts that have really impacted on the business. Peter Preston’s article for the Guardian reinforced this view this week, you can read it here http://bit.ly/1AGm0FA

Peter has viewed the latest figures from Murdoch’s paywall sites and the Mail online. The paywall was designed so that digital money covers the loss of print advertising and cover-price cash. Unfortunately, it’s not working.

At the Mail, growth was scheduled at 40% year on year, to bring in £100m in ads online this financial year and make up for the decline in print revenue.

However, growth has dropped to 20%, the half-year digital ad take, at £36m, makes £100m seem a distant dream. I don’t have all the figures to hand, but you can only think that this is a similar picture across all national and regional press.

So, I go back to my argument in my last post. Surely, all newspapers need to look outside the newspaper/web model? Specific apps, with great content, written by expert journalists cornering the market in their subject might be the way forward.

Remember, mass media has gone. Personal media is the way forward, so deliver personal media. What do advertisers crave most? They want to know that their adverts and promotions hit the bullseye (target audience) like darts champ Phil ‘the Power’ Taylor in his glory days.

There will have been the raising of a few glasses of bubbly and pats on the back when the latest web figures for the regional press were revealed recently.

Unique users is only one way regional newspapers can use to measure audience online.

The amazing year-on-year rise for unique users is laudable, in any other industries they would be handing out bonus payments left, right and centre to the staff.

In the offices of the Manchester Evening News the success was jaw-dropping, an incredible 194 per cent rise in the last year, more success than the city’s most marketable products, its football teams.

Other papers such as the Newcastle Chronicle and Birmingham Mail showed three figure increases. Even my old stomping ground, the Stoke Sentinel hit 88.1 per cent rise, top, top performances.

To be honest, these figures shed sunshine into the pretty gloomy world of the regional press, which has seen circulation decline, a massive reduction in staff and daily cuts in budget.

However, behind the scenes, most newspaper groups may still be worried. Why you may ask? You have to remember that unique users is only one way online audiences can be measured.

The other ways include page impressions, the number of pages the audience views on the web site, time spent on the site and the bounce rate, how much of the audience goes on the site to read one story, but then disappears somewhere else.

In the race to have the biggest online audience and spruce up the odd regional newspaper group for a possible sale, one tactic being used is known as ‘web bait’.

This simply involves putting up a story so tantalising that the audience rushes in…but then disappears down a hole. Have you ever wondered why a story appears on a local web site and it has no connection to the area?

Many a night as I looked despairingly at my web figures did I pluck an obscure story from somewhere else to bolster my uniques. The only criteria was that it was naughty enough to grab a reader.

Sex, bizarre or both, they were the sort of stories I was looking for…

Whether it was local it didn’t matter, my only concern was to ensure I avoided the inevitable ‘why are you so rubbish’ conversation the following morning from those in charge.

The problem is that the audience will jump on board to read the story for a second and then off into the darkness. There’s little or no loyalty.

This method of gaining a crowd cannot be healthy for the longevity of any web site. I hold my hands up, I followed this smash and grab policy despite my better judgement.

To gain an audience to please those to whom I answered, I gave the nod to using the word Fappening, a mixture of happening and…the rest you will have to look up, but it is to do with sex.

This word was associated with the ‘break-in’ and release from the iCloud of celebrities in the nude. We expertly found that the word Fappening was being used as a search term to find these stories and I recklessly decided to use it to go with the story we were doing, we needed the uniques.

I and my brow-beaten team quickly noticed that the audience numbers were quiet during UK time but once America had woken up our number of unique users went mad.

For 48-hours we were the heroes of the web as the audience just kept popping in. The problem is that most of it came from the United States.

This type of incident has been and still is repeated across regional newspapers when the pressure for unique users becomes intense.

One of the issues for a local advertiser maybe that they may want to know where the audience comes from before they decide to spend their hard-earned…or at least ask a few questions and go further than how many unique users a site has.

The regional gang needs to work-out how to keep the audience for longer.

It would also help if at least the audience came from Britain, unless we expect an American to travel a few thousand miles to pick up a Ford Ka from Joe Blogs Motors of Sleaford?

So, the latest web figures, while celebrated, should also be taken with a pinch of salt and we need to consider whether they are truly accurate and if greater transparency is needed by showing page views, bounce rates and time on site.

It is equivalent to newspaper sales managers having to show what percentage of their sale is bulks.

Just a thought. Here’s the original story from the Press Gazette http://bit.ly/1I0x1nf

Editors. Those great beasts of the newsroom. So often they have been misunderstood by those who work with them.

They are made out to be characters to fear, as if they are some peculiar villain from a Hammer House of Horror film.

Every newsroom I have entered had a legend about their editor and some terrible, dark deed.

The reality is that commercial pressures are so strong that many newspapers have buried or not reported stories involving some advertisers like the Daily Telegraph and HSBS.

Eccentric behaviour included throwing typewriters out of windows, threatening staff with violence, pulling a gun out on a senior member of staff or just snarling at journalists as they headed through the newsroom on their way to the pub.

Some were so feared you never spoke to them unless you were called into their throne room.

The stories all had an element of ‘brutality’ of the boss. As time went on this feeling changed to admiration as staff realised this psychopathic behaviour was all about creating an aura in a bid to protect the newspaper and its brand.

The editor needed to be bullet-proof to help them in the fights that lay ahead.

One of the main battlegrounds was editor v the advertising department.

Don’t get me wrong, all editors I have known were more than aware of the need for the business to turn a coin, indeed, many are more commercially savvie than their advertising counterparts.

However, the editor has always had to look at the bigger picture. Why sell your soul for a £150 quarter page ad if the brand would be damaged?

The battles over the horrific ad features were long and hard, as were the fights to stop ‘L-shaped’ ads on page one or full-page ads on the back page of paid for newspapers.

Why would you want to read about your local football team when you could view the latest ad for Virgin trains?

Why fight? Simply, readers mainly buy the paper for news, not adverts. Get the audience in to read the newspaper and the ads would be read. No-one ever said to me I can’t wait to pick up the newspaper for that half-page ad for double-glazing.

So the editor has always been there to protect the brand. Unfortunately, this often led to scenes which wouldn’t have been out of place in a sequel to the Godfather.

Ad reps could often be seen quivering as they presented the latest ugly ad feature planned for page five. The editor’s laser eyes would fix on the poor rep as they tried to persuade them to bend this one time.

What the editor knew was if they did bend the rules once, the floodgates would open and the next move would be for a full-page front page advert selling the delights of a local seedy massage parlour.

But life has changed, a creeping theft of space higher up the book is on the march, first pages two and three were surrendered to full-page adverts, then the back and the future of all front pages is under scrutiny.

Slowly, the power of editors has been removed, those in charge don’t believe they have a use and there are mutterings that all journalists should be editors-in-chief. How wrong they are.

The pressure is on to put ads in places which was usually the realm of quality stories.

As newspaper companies manage their decline, they are trying to bleed the business dry and accentuating the decline by caving in to the desires of advertisers.

Peter Oborne has already lifted the lid on the Daily Telegraph bowing to commercial pressure by failing to publish stories about one of its advertisers, HSBC.

What has surprised me is that everyone seems so horrified. For years there have been heated debates between editors and managing directors about whether a negative story about an advertiser should be published.

Rightly, the editor has stood their ground. But this breed of editor is being surgically removed from newspapers across Britain.

They are being replaced with journalists who, through no fault of their own other than they have diminished power, just say ‘yes’ to everything or face being black bagged.

Once again, I stress that editors more than anyone understand the principles of business and know cash is important, but they would never dream about not printing a court story about an advertiser.

This would be a rocky road for the so-called Fourth Estate which is meant to be independent of government and business.

Readers definitely want to know if there’s a crooked car dealer or butcher in town, but the likelihood of publication is now not a given as in a previous life.

There will be former editors who will be shouting at me over this statement, telling me that it’s time the new class of editors ‘grew some balls’, so to speak. This is not that easy when your opinion holds little or no weight in the business.

Nick Davies in his book Hack Attack says: “The commercial pressure in UK newsrooms is relentless, particularly for mass-circulation titles.”

His point is that journalists have to get that exclusive whatever it takes to ensure that a newspaper sells and revenue tumbles in from sales.

The problem is that with falling sales nationally and locally, great stories aren’t going to bring in massive sales so there’s a decline in revenues.

To make up for this revenue shortfall is the desire to sell space wherever an advertiser wants it, to the detriment of the entire product.

Peter Oborne is right to be outraged, but as we are finding out in this bitter spat between national newspapers is that, with a nod and a wink, newspapers have been protecting big spending advertisers for some while.

The truth is that similar decisions on what to and what not to publish about certain advertisers is going on all of the time, these are not isolated incidents.

The editors of old were right to stand firm, but like dinosaurs they are about to become extinct and the newspaper industry is a poorer, less ethical place without them.